FDR - Jean Edward Smith [111]
Once a week for the remainder of their time in Washington, Eleanor visited the hospital, distributing flowers and cigarettes, stopping to talk with the troubled men. When she discovered there were not enough attendants to provide proper care, she lobbied her friend Franklin K. Lane, secretary of the interior, in whose bailiwick St. Elizabeth’s fell. Lane declined ER’s invitation to visit the hospital—“the last thing he wanted to see was a hospital for the insane”—but he ensured that appropriations for St. Elizabeth’s were increased.42 Eleanor arranged for the Red Cross to build a recreation facility for the men, cajoled money from the Colonial Dames of America for occupational therapy, and organized a retail shop where patients could sell their handmade wares.
At the height of the Red Scare, Eleanor made her first contact with feminist organizations interested in improving working conditions for women. In late October 1919 representatives of nineteen nations convened in Washington for the First International Congress of Working Women. Because many of the delegates could not speak English, Mrs. Roosevelt and other multilingual Washington wives volunteered as translators. “It was of course, a very advanced and radical gathering,” Eleanor wrote Sara, “but I found it interesting and amusing.”43
Eleanor invited a number of the women home for lunch. The U.S. delegation included many early activists in the American labor movement: Margaret Dreier Robins, Rose Schneiderman, Maud Swartz, Julia O’Connor, Fannia Cohn, and Leonora O’Reilly. “I liked all of the women very much indeed,” said Eleanor, “but I had no idea how much I was going to see of them in the future.”44
After four months of additional negotiation, President Wilson returned to Washington on July 8 with the freshly minted Treaty of Versailles. Two days later, he presented it to the Senate. The treaty, he said, had come about “by no plan of our conceiving but by the hand of God who has led us into this way.”45
The Senate was divided. A dozen or so irreconcilables, primarily populists from the South and West, favored rejection. Most Democrats supported the president and wished to accept the treaty outright. In the middle was a large group of Republicans led by Lodge who favored approval provided reservations to protect American sovereignty were registered. Unlike amendments, reservations do not change the text of a treaty but clarify how it will be interpreted. It is a well-established diplomatic practice for countries to add such qualifications, and if Wilson agreed, the chances were that the Senate would approve the treaty overwhelmingly. Secretary of State Lansing and the Senate’s Democratic leadership urged the president to accept the reservations, but Wilson refused.46
Convinced that God and the people were with him, the president chose to make a direct appeal to the electorate. On September 2, 1919, Wilson set out by special train to canvass the West. His health was failing. He had already suffered a mild stroke in Paris in April and was haggard and drawn. His face twitched, his hands trembled. During the next twenty-two days the president would travel 8,200 miles through fourteen states, delivering more than forty speeches. On September 25 Wilson spoke at Pueblo, Colorado. That evening he suffered a total physical collapse. The tour was canceled, and the president returned to the White House. The following week Wilson had a massive stroke that paralyzed his left side. For two months he hovered between life and death, barely able to scrawl a shaky signature on documents his wife presented to him. After that his mind became clear enough to follow what was happening and he was able to dictate letters. But he never fully recovered.
On November 6 Senator Gilbert Hitchcock of Nebraska, the Democratic floor leader in the fight for the League, was admitted to the president’s bedside. Without the Lodge reservations, he told Wilson, he could not muster even a bare majority for the treaty, much less the two thirds required for approval. Wilson refused to accept the inevitable.